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Early Word Reading of Preschoolers with ASD, Both With and Without Hyperlexia, Compared to Typically Developing Preschoolers

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Abstract

A portion of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit a strength in early word reading referred to as hyperlexia (HPL), yet it remains unclear what mechanisms underlie this strength. Typically developing children (TD) acquire phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge and language skills as precursors to word reading. We compared these skills across English-speaking preschoolers with ASD, both with and without hyperlexia, and TD preschoolers. Findings indicated that the group with both ASD and HPL (ASD + HPL) exhibited advanced word reading and letter naming skills as compared to the other two groups, but did not demonstrate commensurate phonological awareness, letter-sound correspondence, or language skills. Findings support an alternative, non-phonological approach to early word reading in preschoolers with ASD and hyperlexia.

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Notes

  1. Newman et al. (2007) had four preschoolers aged 5 years and younger mixed with 16 school-aged and adolescents (M=10.41 years, range 3–19.75).

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Acknowledgments

Support for this research was provided by graduate fellowships to D.M. from the Organization for Autism Research (OAR); the Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Societé et Culture (FRQSC); the Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music (CRBLM), and operational grants from McGill University’s William Dawson Scholar Program to E.M.Q. We would like to thank Emerging Minds, Ottawa, ON for the use of their office space; Bianca Mercadante, Research Assistant, and all the parents and their wonderful children who participated in this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology, McGill University, 3700 McTavish Street, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Dianne Macdonald, Gigi Luk & Eve-Marie Quintin

  2. Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music, McGill University, 3640 de la Montagne, Montréal, QC, H3G 2A8, Canada

    Dianne Macdonald, Gigi Luk & Eve-Marie Quintin

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  1. Dianne Macdonald
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  2. Gigi Luk
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Contributions

D.M and E.M.Q conceived and designed the study. D.M recruited participants and collected all the data. D.M and E.M.Q analyzed the data. D.M, E.M.Q and G.L wrote the paper. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Eve-Marie Quintin.

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The original version of this article was revised: the format error in Table 6 was corrected.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4, 5 and 6.

Table 4 Correlations for TD group and group with ASD + HPL (raw scores)
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Table 5 Correlations for groups with ASD-HPL and ASD + HPL (raw scores)
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Table 6 Correlations for ASD severity, age, word reading and phonological awareness for groups with ASD + HPL and ASD-HPL (raw scores)
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Macdonald, D., Luk, G. & Quintin, EM. Early Word Reading of Preschoolers with ASD, Both With and Without Hyperlexia, Compared to Typically Developing Preschoolers. J Autism Dev Disord 51, 1598–1612 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04628-8

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